Why african american women are single

The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American. So why does the Times , like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families?

To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legal barriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance, just as poor immigrants had.

Conditions for testing that proposition looked good. Between the Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of , legal racism had been dismantled. And the economy was humming along; in the first five years of the sixties, the economy generated 7 million jobs. About half of all blacks had moved into the middle class by the mid-sixties, but now progress seemed to be stalling. The rise in black income relative to that of whites, steady throughout the fifties, was sputtering to a halt.

More blacks were out of work in than in Most alarming, after rioting in Harlem and Paterson, New Jersey, in , the problems of the northern ghettos suddenly seemed more intractable than those of the George Wallace South. Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts.

One in particular caught his eye. This no longer seemed true. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order. The first was empirical and would quickly become indisputable: single-parent families were on the rise in the ghetto.

But other points were more speculative and sparked a partisan dispute that has lasted to this day. Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination.

Though black sociologist E. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so. B ut Moynihan went much further than merely overthrowing familiar explanations about the cause of poverty. More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them.

Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Astonishingly, even for that surprising time, the Johnson administration agreed. But he also broke into new territory, analyzing the family problem with what strikes the contemporary ear as shocking candor. By that summer, the Moynihan report that was its inspiration was under attack from all sides.

In part, the hostility was an accident of timing. Just days after the report was leaked to Newsweek in early August, L. The televised images of the South Central Los Angeles rioters burning down their own neighborhood collided in the public mind with the contents of the report.

Less forgivable was the refusal to grapple seriously—either at the time or in the months, years, even decades to come—with the basic cultural insight contained in the report: that ghetto families were at risk of raising generations of children unable to seize the opportunity that the civil rights movement had opened up for them. He heard code for the archaic charge of black licentiousness. For white liberals and the black establishment, poverty became a zero-sum game: either you believed, as they did, that there was a defect in the system, or you believed that there was a defect in the individual.

It was as if critiquing the family meant that you supported inferior schools, even that you were a racist. By autumn, when a White House conference on civil rights took place, the Moynihan report, initially planned as its centerpiece, had been disappeared. W ell, not exactly. Over the next 15 years, the black family question actually became a growth industry inside academe, the foundations, and the government. Think instead about the 75 percent of black middle-class families—though Moynihan had made a special point of exempting them from his report.

Other black pride—inspired scholars looked at female-headed families and declared them authentically African and therefore a good thing. In a related vein, Carol Stack published All Our Kin , a HEW-funded study of families in a midwestern ghetto with many multigenerational female households. In fact, some scholars continued, maybe the nuclear family was really just a toxic white hang-up, anyway. No one asked what nuclear families did, or how they prepared children for a modern economy.

The important point was simply that they were not black. The lucky black single mother could also enjoy more equal relationships with men than her miserably married white sisters.

If black pride made it hard to grapple with the increasingly separate and unequal family, feminism made it impossible. Fretting about single-parent families was now not only racist but also sexist, an effort to deny women their independence, their sexuality, or both.

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African American women continue to have higher rates of unemployment than white women and continue to have lower amounts of weekly usual earnings and median wealth compared to their male counterparts and white women.

These disparities leave a growing portion of our population more vulnerable to poverty and its implications. While African American women have a rich history of leadership in their communities, they are underrepresented in all levels of government. Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF and Scribd versions.